The Board of Directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has determined that the proposal for a new top level domain submitted by ICM Registry, Inc. has met the criteria established by ICANN. Accordingly, ICM Registry will now move forward into technical and commercial contractual negotiations with ICANN to generate a voluntary .xxx top-level domain (TLD). more
I am writing this from the Satellite 2008 conference in Washington, D.C. As I make my way through the exhibits, I see many vendors advertising IP capabilities in their hardware products or network services. But when asked about IPv6 support, the common reply is a not so believable "it is on our roadmap" followed by a somewhat vague delivery date. Although IPv6 development has been slow across the board, it appears to be moving even more slowly in the satellite world... more
Is it really 2022? Is it? Although many might view 2021 as another "lost" year due to the pandemic, filled with Zoom™ meetings, virtual conferences, working from home and restricted travel - there were a number of notable domain name stories which deserve to be highlighted. So, without further ado, here are the top 10 biggest domain name stories of 2021 - let's go! more
With all of the buzz around apps & app stores it would be easy to assume that mobile apps have unstoppable momentum and that the mobile web is taking a back seat. It's worth taking a step back to see how this is all going to pan out. Will mobile apps dominate completely and overwhelm the mobile web or does the mobile web still stand a chance? more
I'm a network engineer, and like many engineers I often gravitate to the big projects; large networks with problems of scale and complexity in my case. However, I also consider myself a student of Occam's razor and often quote Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: "perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." In this spirit of "less is more" I have recently become intrigued by the problems appearing in home networking. more
Neophotonics, the Nasdaq-listed producer of various optical communications products, including silicon photonics and photonic integrated circuits (PICs), warned investor this week that the new restrictions on business with China's Huawei - its largest customer - could have a major impact on future sales. more
In the second part of this 3-part series article, the issue of UDRP in proving bad-faith domain registrations is examined with respect to the trademark's characteristics. The first part of this article can be found here. In assessing whether there is a passive holding of a domain name, panels look carefully into the trademark's characteristics in question, namely what is the degree of reputation and distinctiveness of the trademark in question. more
During ICANN's public forum in Cape Town, an interesting conflict accidentally came up, even if somewhat concealed by the usual exchange of well-known views on whether ICANN should finally allow the world to get more new Top Level Domains (TLDs) on a regular basis. I know I am oversimplifying thoughts and positions, but basically the discussion was between a couple of 30-year-old engineers from the floor asking to be given the opportunity to try new things, and a couple of 60-year-old engineers from the podium putting up any kind of unproven excuses... more
Colonial Pipeline, which accounts for close to half of the United States East Coast's fuel, has shut down its operations due to a cyberattack. The incident, believed to be the largest successful cyberattack on oil infrastructure in the U.S., was disclosed over the weekend. more
Every person and every entity must have a philosophy if they are to be successful. Consumer trust is one of the key issues at the heart of keeping the Internet open as well as prosperous. The ICANN Affirmation of Commitments was signed in 2009 and has been the guiding principle for ICANN's activities going forward. The title of section 9.3 is Promoting competition, consumer trust, and consumer choice. This section is in essence the embodiment of the commitment of ICANN. more
It's not been the best of years for ICANN. Leaving aside for a few seconds the controversy about xxx, and the allegations of improper behavior about the .Net assignment, ICANN has had a lot to deal with. The troubles began with the UN Working Group on Internet Governance hell bent on fixing ICANN, even though ICANN says nothing is broke. That trouble remains and isn't likely to go away for some time. And then, just when it seemed that the UN and ITU was the cause of all ICANN's problems, the old ally, US Government's DOC, decided that it was going to be in charge of ICANN. ...This could be the beginnings of a distinct change where the centralized DNS as we know it gradually gives way to some next generation structure which is far more decentralized. The coming 12 months may see some significant changes in this area. more
In this action under the usTLD Dispute Resolution Policy (which mirrors the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy), Complainant sought transfer of the Domain Name grazia.us. Complainant, an Italian company, has used the mark GRAZIA for many years in several markets around the world in connection with its fashion magazine. more
Nokia Deepfield is another company that works in the background on the web, and that analyzes data traffic patterns for the big ISPs. Their June 4 report on web traffic reports about the same thing we're hearing from most large ISPs -- the volume of web traffic suddenly shot up since the onset of the pandemic. Nokia Deepfield says that the increase in traffic has settled in at about a 25% increase over pre-COVID levels. more
No that's not really happening, Google is not buying VeriSign. But given Google's ravenous appetite for data, it might find VeriSign quite attractive. VeriSign has both root domain name servers and servers for the .com and .net top level domains (TLDs). VeriSign could data mine the queries coming into those servers and produce a very valuable real-time stream of what users on the net are doing... Google just bought Postini -- and one would have to be fairly naive to believe that Google does not intend to dredge through all... more
Researchers from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China have started work on a project based on a distributed information retrieval system that promises to address future search engine scalability issues that are believed to be inevitable as the Internet continues to expand: "With the rapid increase of web pages, the coverage of search engines will become poorer and the update intervals will be much longer. If the current architecture of search engines is still in use, it will be an impossible mission to find the precise and comprehensive information in the future. This problem will be more serious when IPv6 technology is widely implemented in communication networks. The problem of 'Too much information means no information' may become a disaster with information explosion." more